Saturday, June 14, 2008

Five Best Photo Sharing Web Sites [Hive Five]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/310505113/five-best-photo-sharing-web-sites


The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over 10 years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our cell phone cameras. As a result, we snap picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, which means you've got hundreds of pictures to share with friends and family. On Tuesday we asked you to tell us your favorite photo sharing web site, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for the low-down on the five best photo sharing tools the web has to offer, then cast your vote for the site you like best.

SmugMug

SmugMug is a premium photo sharing web site with an emphasis on professional photography. That's not to say that the site's not also perfect for the weekend photographer, as its attractive and user-friendly interface is tempting for any level of photog. The biggest hurdle for new SmugMug users is that the site has no free account (though there is a 14-day free trial), and the minimum price for an account is $40/year. However, SmugMug users—many of whom are former Flickr die-hards (there's even an import tool called Smugglr)—seem very pleased with their choice.


Personal Web Site



If you're willing to roll up y! our slee ves and you've got some hosted web space, you can host your digital photos on your own web site. Granted, it may seem like a lot more work compared to the other options, but hosting your photos on a personal site means you've got total control, and some free, open-source options for rolling your own hosting solution are often as robust on features as their counterparts. If that sounds appealing, we've already walked you through how to set up the free Gallery2 (pictured above) on your hosted web server. You may also want to check out Jalbum (pictured at the top of this article).


Flickr



Flickr was originally conceived in 2002 as a video game-screenshot sharing web site, but it quickly blossomed into a full-fledged photo sharing site with a bustling community. The now Yahoo-owned site offers free accounts with limitations placed on photo uploads and other features, while the $25/year Pro account promises unlimited uploads, storage, and sets. Flickr, like many of the others, also recently added video sharing to their repertoire.


Picasa Web Albums



Picasa Web Albums are the online counterpart to Google's popular, Windows- and Linux-only desktop photo organization software, Picasa. Despite its late entry to the photo sharing game in mid-2006, Picasa Web Album's seamless integration with Picasa and Google accounts quickly gained the service a large following. A free account with Picasa Web Albums gives you 1GB of free storage space, and you can buy extra storage that's shared with your Gmail account for anywhere between $20/year for 10GB to $500/year for 400GB.


Photobucket



Once upon a time, Photobucket was a favorite among internet users looking to quickly host an image and share it online at sites like eBay and MySpace or on blogs and message boards. While that's still true, Photobucket has added several features to keep users coming back to the site for managing photo albums and videos.


Now that you've seen the best, it's time to vote for your favorite:


Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.


Honorable mention goes to social networking web site Facebook and the online artist community deviantArt.

Whether or not it made the short list, let's hear more about your favorite in the comments.


Use a Fluid Webapp for User Agent Tricks [Mac OS X Tip]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/311122091/use-a-fluid-webapp-for-user-agent-tricks

fluid_app.jpgIf you're a Mac user who's been intrigued by the things you can score by pretending Safari is an iPhone, such as free full magazines and Starbucks web access, the Tech-Recipes blog points out that you can save yourself the hassle of enabling and switching over your browser's user agent. Simply install the webapp creator Fluid and create a specific stealth-iPhone agent within Fluid's interface. Now you can keep a shortcut to magazines, your email, or whatever needs a work-around tucked away for when it's really useful.


Make Your Own Stabilized Video Collage [Digital Photography]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/311807044/make-your-own-stabilized-video-collage

stabilizedvideocollage.png One of the most creative uses of Flickr video support is the "stabilized video collage," a beautiful way to capture a scene in a multi-frame moving portrait, as shown. Out of respect for the producer's copyright, we didn't embed the actual video example in this post, just a reduced thumbnail—so go here to see it in action. Then check out a how-to video on making your own collage, which involves combining two videos into one frame using Motion for Mac. Neat!


EFiX USB Dongle Will Boot and Install OS X on Any PC, Supposedly [Hackintosh]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/311253416/efix-usb-dongle-will-boot-and-install-os-x-on-any-pc-supposedly

Not up to the messier parts of building a Hackintosh? EFiX is a USB dongle that promises to take care of all of that for you, automagically on any PC. Pop it into the port and you can install OS X straight from the DVD "without having to worry about patches, replacing files and anything like that." Update: There's a video demo of this black magic here.

If you're thinking it sounds too good to be true and that the site looks a little scuammy, you should know that it took a lot of time to craft this voodoo stick and required the developers to thwart "various problems, including sabotage." After six months of testing, it's due on June 23. Our advice? Let someone else be the guinea pig. Hey guinea pigs, if you buy this, let us know how it goes! [EFiX via Insanely Mac via Hack a Day]


Intel Launching Cheap Quad Core Processors to Battle Budget AMD Triple Cores [Intel]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/311322935/intel-launching-cheap-quad-core-processors-to-battle-budget-amd-triple-cores

Digitimes is reporting that Intel is about to pop a series of cheap quad core processors (Q8000) to slap back at AMD's budget triple core offerings. The first will be the Core 2 Quad 8200, which'll run at 2.33GHz with a 4MB L2 cache, supporting a front-side bus of up to 1333MHz for around $200. Difference between these and standard Q9000 series is that these don't support Intel's Trusted Execution or Virtualization Technology.

These seem kinda redundant, since you can pick up a Core 2 Quad 6600 for that much (or the newer 45nm Q9300 for not a whole lot more), both of which trounced AMD's fastest quad core in benchmarks. And AMD's triple cores ain't exactly anything to sing about to begin with. [DigiTimes via Tech Report]


Nokia 6205 flip official for Verizon

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/311143042/

Filed under:


Nokia's got a new no-frills handset coming to Verizon on June 15th, the Nokia 6205. Specs like a 1.3 megapixel camera, 58MB of memory and the Verizon UI -- no thank you -- won't have us in a hurry to turn in our N95, but the real news here is that the phone was designed by Nokia itself, and they're promising even more phones for Verizon in the future -- though S60 might not be in the cards. The 6205 has a 2-inch 176 x 220 screen on the inside, and a 1.28-inch 128 x 128 LCD on the back, there's a microSD slot, plenty of audio codec support, Bluetooth and a paltry 4 hours of talk time due to the EV-DO connection this thing wastes on a WAP 2.0 browser. It comes in the standard blue version, available in July, or you can pick up "The Dark Knight" edition we heard about (pictured), complete with movie-based ringtones and a pre-loaded trailer, on June 15th. Both will retail for $119 with contract.

In need of some hands-on of this phone? That's weird. Check it out at Engadget Mobile.

Permalink | Email this | Comments